Resist ‘Do Not Resist’ Advice

It was late April 1997. Monica Leech, 39, was working at Western Financial Bank in Thousand Oaks when two bank robbers stormed in and robbed the bank, takeover-style. Leech did as she was told, yet one of the robbers shot her in the head, killing her.

On the newscasts that followed this killing, police officers and television anchors repeated the tired old line: When confronted, do not resist. Do as you are told. Your money is not worth dying for. Do not resist. Give in and live. But “do not resist” is not all it’s cracked up to be. It puzzles me that police and the media continually tell us not to resist in the face of violent, wrongful assault. Why? In the early days of the United States, there was no expectation that the police would be there to do all our work for us. The police force was originally meant to assist private citizens in protecting and defending themselves. Yet in our laziness and complacency, we have accepted the notion that we do not have to lift a finger, that the police will take care of it. Such is the stupidity of our modern culture.

Fact: Local police cannot possibly stop or control crime. The best they can do is to limit it and to clean up the aftermath.

Fact: The higher the degree of community involvement in such things as Neighborhood Watch, patrolling, communications among neighbors, school involvement, etc., the less crime there is.

Thus, it is not reasonable for our “leaders” to tell the public to “not resist” criminals. That is both absurd and demeaning. If law-abiding individuals took responsibility for their schools, streets, neighborhoods, and especially their own children, crime could be cut dramatically.

I have long maintained that one way to dramatically cut down on bank robberies is to either have all bank workers behind two inches of bulletproof glass or train every teller in the use of firearms.

Crime absolutely should be resisted. Too many entrenched politicians want the public to be disarmed because they don’t trust us to keep firearms responsibly and think the police will protect us.

Such is a foolhardy way to deal with the criminal barbarians in our midst, and history shows us that the path of not resisting does not work. However, and to our great detriment, it has been said that the only thing we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history.